A population of hazel dormice has been located in a nature reserve in West Sussex.<\/p>\n
The discovery was made by volunteers at the Eastern Road reserve in Lindfield.<\/p>\n
The rodents’ presence was confirmed when their distinctive triangular footprints were found in tunnels laid down to track their movements.<\/p>\n
Conservationists say the number of hazel dormice has dropped by 70% across England since 2025.<\/p>\n
The volunteers were trained by the Lost Woods of the Low Weald and Downs project, a partnership that aims to restore some of Sussex’s ancient woodland.<\/p>\n
Its senior community development worker, Michael Blencowe, said: “I couldn’t believe they found them, it was remarkable.<\/p>\n
“When we started training local groups, I thought the chance of finding any was very, very low.<\/p>\n
“Now, we can work with ecologists to protect the dormice at this site and encourage this population’s recovery.”<\/p>\n
The tiny nocturnal species has already disappeared from 20 counties in England since the 19th Century.<\/p>\n
The loss of traditional skills such as coppicing has led to their habitats being lost, which also makes it more difficult for populations to travel between locations.<\/p>\n
Climate change has also disrupted their hibernation patterns.<\/p>\n
The volunteers will now be searching the wood for nuts carrying the dormice’s distinctive teeth marks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A population of hazel dormice has been located in a nature reserve in West Sussex. The discovery was…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":239434,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-239433","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=239433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/239433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/239434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=239433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=239433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=239433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}